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Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day, is a traditional North American holiday to give thanks, traditionally to God, for the things that one has at the conclusion of the harvest season. Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States and on the second Monday of October in Canada.

They say that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims and the Native Americans up in Plymouth, MA. That, for the most part, seems to be true. But what foods did they eat? Historians aren’t completely certain, but we know that the pilgrims weren’t piling up on pumpkin pie or grave-ing their mashed potatoes. There was certain more meat than vegies, especially since the Pilgrims had access to lobster and seal.

Most people think that Thanksgiving was a yearly celebration. The fact of the matter is that the feast was a one time, three day long thing, mainly due to the fact that it was a harvest festival. The feast celebrated the Pilgrims first good harvest and the help of the natives. They were giving thanks that they survived the year and were ready for the winter. The feast was most likely earlier than our current Thanksgiving. The early settlers of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts were particularly grateful to Squanto, the Native American and former British slave who taught them how to both catch eel and grow corn and also served as their native interpreter. Without Squanto’s assistance, the settlers might not have survived in the New World.

However, there have been other records of Thanksgiving, or Harvest Festivals, before the Pilgrims. One is the 1619 Thanksgiving by the Berkeley Hundred in VA. (More info)